RATZINGER

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1er article paru dans la revue SI SI NO NO en Decembre 1998 puis en Mars 1999 dans la revue americaine The Angelus

Source : http://www.sspxasia.com/Documents/SiSiNoNo/1999_March/The_Memories_of_a_Destructive_Mind.htm
Titre de l'article : The Memories of a destructive Mind - PART I - Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's Milestones

Among the authors preferred by Ratzinger was the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. Ratzinger loved St. Augustine, but never St. Thomas Aquinas: "By contrast, I had difficulties in penetrating the thought of Thomas Aquinas, whose crystal-clear logic seemed to be too closed in on itself, too impersonal and ready-made" (op. cit., p.44). This aversion was mainly due to the professor of philosophy at the seminary, who "presented us with a rigid, neo-scholastic Thomism that was simply too far afield from my own questions" (ibid.). According to Cardinal Ratzinger, whose current opinions appear unchanged from those he held as a seminarian, the thought of Aquinas was "too closed in on itself, too impersonal and ready-made," and was unable to respond to the personal questions of the faithful. This opinion is enunciated by a prince of the Church whose function it is to safeguard the purity of the doctrine of the Faith! Why, then, should anyone be surprised at the current disastrous crisis of Catholicism, or seek to attribute it to the world, when those who should be the defenders of the Faith, and hence of genuine Catholic thought, are like sewers drinking in the filth, or like gardeners who cut down a tree they are supposed to be nurturing? What can it mean to stigmatize St. Thomas as having a "too impersonal and ready-made" logic? Is logic "personal"? These assertions reveal, in the person who makes them, a typically Protestant, pietist attitude, like that found in those who seek the rule of faith in personal interior sentiment.
Joseph Ratzinger loved the professors who asked many questions, but disliked those who defended dogma with the crystal-clear logic of St. Thomas. This attitude would seem to us to match his manner of understanding Catholic liturgy. He tells us that from childhood he was always attracted to the liturgical movement and was sympathetic towards it. One can see that for him, the liturgy was a matter of feeling, a lived experience, an aesthetically pleasing "Erlebnis," but fundamentally irrational (op. cit. passim.).
In recalling his professor of exegesis, a man of liberal tendencies, Ratzinger attests to his merits: "A characteristic fruitfulness came from the balance between liberalism and dogma" (op. cit., p.52). Note well his point: the balance is not found in the defense of dogma against liberalism, but by finding an equilibrium between liberalism, which seeks to subject dogma to the critique of natural reason, and dogma itself. How such an unnatural balance could be struck, the Cardinal does not say.
At 26, the future cardinal was a doctor of theology. His next step was to work towards obtaining the habilitation, the degree that qualifies a person to hold a chair at a German university. [It is obtained by writing a weighty scholarly book that proposes and defends a thesis and then receiving approval for it from an academic committee. - Ed.] This degree he obtained Feb. 21, 1957, at nearly 30 years of age, but not without controversy. The "critical" part of his thesis was, in fact, rejected, in such a way that he was obliged to truncate and edit it, and present to the committee just the "historical" part of the original, centered on the analysis of the relation between St. Bonaventure and Joachim of Flora, a monk of very doubtful orthodoxy, whom Ratzinger describes as a "pious and cultivated monk."
Revelation is for men, but its intrinsic worth does not depend upon its being grasped by man, because human reason has nothing to do with its coming. As truth, which, moreover is absolute because supernatural, revelation has its own existence and meaning in itself, in a way that is entirely independent of "receiving subjects," that is, the men for whom God destined it. But Cardinal Ratzinger obviously does not believe in the existence of truth per se, that is, he does not believe in the principle of right reason as taught by St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas teaches that supernatural truth is independent of the subject seeking to know it. Truth has an objective, intrinsic value completely independent of any external circumstance or knowing subject.

2nd article paru dans la revue SI SI NO NO en Decembre 1998 puis en Mai 1999 dans la revue americaine The Angelus

Source : http://www.sspxasia.com/Documents/SiSiNoNo/1999_May/The_Memories_of_a_Destructive_Mind.htm
Titre de l'article : The Memories of a destructive Mind - PART II - Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's Milestones

The interpretation of this dogmatic declaration [the Assumption], as everyone can see for himself, is rather peculiar. In fact, it presents the typical traits of the New Theology. The Cardinal's theology is not Catholic theology; it is the new theology because it makes the supernatural depend upon man's own thought in order to keep Revelation open. It is not for nothing that he was profoundly influenced - as he himself recognizes - by Henri de Lubac!
Ratzinger : A renewal of liturgical awareness, a liturgical reconciliation that again recognizes the unity of the history of the liturgy and that understands Vatican II, not as a breach, but as a stage of development: these things are urgently needed for the life of the Church. I am convinced that the crisis in the Church that we are experiencing today is to a large extent due to the disintegration of the liturgy, which at times has even come to be conceived of etsi Deus non daretur?Then the community is celebrating only itself, an activity that is utterly fruitless?This is why we need a new Liturgical Movement, which will call to life the real heritage of the Second Vatican Council (ibid.).
What is striking is that in this autobiography, there is no self-criticism: those who accused him of being a liberal and a modernist simply have not understood his thinking. Likewise, those who accuse Vatican II because of the disastrous situation in the Church which has resulted also have not understood Vatican II. Or rather, the history - and the analysis - of Vatican II are yet to be accomplished.
His remarks come across as a fastidious apologia. Cardinal Ratzinger seems to have learned nothing from all that has happened. He is only concerned with showing the continuity of his theology, believing that by so doing he is defending both himself and Vatican II. From this defense a certain image of Cardinal Ratzinger as restorer of the Faith has been created; and it is an image in which many still believe. However, it is only blatant mystification.
The reputation of Ratzinger as restorer of the Church does not rest on his works. It is probably owing to the fact that several times he has quite clearly described certain disorders, and that he has always dissociated himself from the most extreme factions. But this takes away nothing from the modernist foundation of his theological vision: "Ratzinger is always like that: To counter the excesses, from which he keeps his distance, he never proposes Catholic truth, but rather an apparently more moderate error, which, nevertheless, in the logic of error, leads to the same ruinous conclusions" (SISINONO, no.6, 1993, p.6).
Some commentators have compared the Second Vatican Council to the Estates General of the French Revolution. Developing the analogy, one might say that Cardinal Ratzinger is a Girondist. The members of that faction were certainly more politically moderate than were the Jacobins, and especially their left wing (to which, in theology, we could compare the Kungs, Drewermanns, etc.), but they were no less revolutionary. They wanted to accomplish the same objectives, only in a more gradual, pragmatic manner. Their vision of the world, though, was identical: human reason exalted and placed in the center of the universe, democracy, bourgeois individualism; identical, too, was their hatred of Christianity, their desire to confiscate the goods of the Church, etc.

3ieme article paru dans la revue SI SI NO NO en Avril 1997 puis en janvier 1998 dans sa traduction anglaise

Source : http://www.sspxasia.com/Documents/SiSiNoNo/1998_January/Cardinal_Ratzinger.htm
Titre de l'article : Cardinal Ratzinger : COMMUNION WITHOUT CONFESSION AND THE 1983 CODE OF CANON LAW. The Fideism of Cardinal Ratzinger, Perfect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

Up to the very end of his conference, Card. Ratzinger resolutely continues on this road of agnosticism and now logically comes to the most disastrous of conclusions. He writes: "In conclusion, as we contemplate our present-day religious situation, of which I have tried to throw some light on some of its elements, we may well marvel at the fact that, after all, people still continue believing in a Christian manner, not only according to Hick's, Knitter's as well as others' substitute ways or forms, but also according to that full and joyous Faith found in the New Testament of the Church of all time." So, there it is: For Card. Ratzinger, "Hick, Knitter, and others" who deny the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, His Church, His sacraments, and, in short, all of Christianity, continue "despite everything" "believing in a Christian manner," even though they do so using "substitute forms of belief"! Here, the Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Faith leaves us wondering indeed, just what it is he means by "believing in a Christian manner."
According to this, it is therefore not objective motives based on history and reason, and thus the truth of Christianity, but only a subjective appreciation which brings us to "see" that it [Christianity] is able to satisfy the profound needs of human nature and which would explain the "success" [modernists would say the "vitality"] of the "faith" ["of all time" or in its "substitute forms," it is of but little importance]. Such, however, is not at all Catholic doctrine: this is simply modernist apologetics (cf. Pope St. Pius X, Pascendi), based on their affirmed impossibility of grasping metaphysical knowledge (or agnosticism or skepticism), which Card. Ratzinger seemed to want to shun in the first part of his address.
Now we are in a position to better understand why Card. Ratzinger has such a wide-open concept of "theology" and of "faith" that he includes everything: theology as well as heresies, faith and apostasy. On that road of denial of the human reason's ability of attaining metaphysical knowledge, a road which he continues to follow, he lacks the "means of discerning the difference between faith and non-faith" (R. Amerio, op. cit., p.340) and, consequently, theology from pseudo-theology, truth from heresy:
"All theologies are nullified, because all are regarded as equivalent; the heart or kernel of religion is located in feelings or experiences, as the Modernists held at the beginning of this century" (Amerio, op. cit., p.542).
We cannot see how this position of Card. Ratzinger can escape that solemn condemnation proclaimed at Vatican I: "If anyone says...that men must be brought to the Faith solely by their own personal interior experience...let him be anathema" (DB 1812).

4ieme article paru dans la revue SI SI NO NO en Septembre 1993 puis en aout 1994 dans sa traduction anglaise

Source : http://www.sspxasia.com/Documents/SiSiNoNo/1994_June/They_Think_Theyve_Won_PartVI.htm
Titre de l'article : CARDINAL RATZINGER: A PREFECT WITHOUT FAITH AT THE CONGREGATION FOR THE FAITH

A FRIGHTFUL PROBLEM
It is of Divine and Catholic Truth, that God became man and more precisely, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, Who is God as is the Father and the Holy Ghost; that He (the Second Person) took on a human nature and that therefore, in Our Lord Jesus Christ, there are two natures (the human and the divine) united in one Divine Person. This union is called the hypostatic union. Which the Church has always and everywhere put forward for our belief and which She has defended against heresy (for example in the Councils of Ephesus, Chalcedon, and Constantinople V).
What are we to say, therefore, when we are obliged to face the fact that the present Prefect of the Congregation for the Faith professes quite the contrary in his books of theology - that in Jesus, it is not God Who became man, but rather, man who became God? As a matter of fact, in Ratzinger's mind, just who is Jesus Christ? He is that "man in whom the definitive reality of man's being is manifested, and who, by that very fact, is God at the same time."
What does this mean - if not that man, in his "definitive reality" is God and that Christ is a man, who is, or better yet, became God by the sole fact that in Him has come to light that "definitive reality of man's being"? (La Foi Chretienne, hier et aujourd'hui p.126).
THE PREFECT
But perhaps Ratzinger the Prefect (of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) later denied or refuted Ratzinger the theologian? Not at all; in fact, quite the contrary. His "theological" works continue to be reprinted unchanged. (The Italian version of The Christian Faith - Yesterday and Today, has already reached its eighth edition.) Ratzinger the Prefect has never yet corrected or withdrawn one iota of his writings. On these "theological works," new generations of clerics will be formed in complete ignorance of Catholic theology and will, in the future, distort the most elementary truths of the Catholic Faith.
Ratzinger the Prefect goes even farther: he sponsors and collaborates officially in the review Communio, the press organ of "those who think they have won," that same Communio which he founded together with his friends De Lubac and Von Balthasar. On May 28, 1992, Ratzinger, fortified by his prestige as Prefect of the Faith, was able to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Communio in Rome, in the great amphitheater of the Gregorian University, in the presence of a multitude of cardinals as well as the professors of Roman theological faculties. Communio was printed in several languages, and since it is under the patronage of the prefect for the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, it serves to indicate, unofficially but clearly, to the clergy of various countries the line of belief, action, and conduct wanted by "Rome."
ROME NOW OCCUPIED BY "NEW THEOLOGIANS"
Ratzinger the Prefect, the driving force behind the modernists' express train, has filled Rome with "new theologians" who have set up shop in the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in particular, as well as in other commissions under his presidency. And so it is that, in order to ?promote sound doctrine? under the prefecture of Cardinal Ratzinger, there is to be found among others, in that very same Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a bishop Lehmann who rejects the bodily resurrection of Christ (cf. Courrier de Rome July-August 1993, "Bishops without Faith"). But for Ratzinger also, Jesus is "the one who died on the Cross and who, in the eyes of the Faith [sic!] has risen again" (The Christian Faith-Yesterday and Today, p.146).
WITH (AND WITHOUT) DISCRETION
What is to be said about the more discreet, yet very effective publicity methods used by Ratzinger the Prefect in promoting the "new theology"? No sooner had Walter Kasper been named bishop of Rottenburg-Stuttgart than Ratzinger wrote to him, "You represent, in these stormy times, a precious gift from Heaven" (30 Giorni, May 1989). Urs von Balthasar died in June 1988, on the very eve of receiving the "well-deserved honorary distinction of the cardinalate." Ratzinger the Prefect personally delivered the funeral oration (at the cemetery in Lucerne, Switzerland) in which he praised the deceased to the skies as he bestowed upon the departed cleric the honor of theologian probatus."
Must anything else be added to prove that Ratzinger the Prefect is in perfect accord with Ratzinger the "theologian"? Yes, we do owe it to our readers to point out the fact that Elio Guerriero; chief editor of Communio (Italian edition) is in perfect agreement with us on this score. In order to illustrate the new theology's victorious march in his journal Jesus (April, 1992), he wrote, "Anyway, in Rome we must bring to your attention the work done by Joseph Ratzinger, both as a theologian and as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith." The only thing left of Ratzinger the "restorer" is the myth.
Ratzinger is always the same: those excesses or abuses from which he keeps a "respectful" distance (often by cutting remarks) he never opposes with Catholic truth but only with some other apparently more moderate error which, however, in the logic of error, nevertheless leads inevitably to the same ruinous conclusions.
For this reason, a Catholic who cherishes the Catholic Faith and loves the Church is able to favor or subscribe to a number of Ratzinger's central affirmations, but, on closer observation of what this "restorer" proposes in place of the current universally-deplored "abuses," he will find himself unable to approve even a single sentence. And this is because the downward neo-modernist path leads us down the same slippery slope, even though it does so more gradually, it still ends up with the very same complete rejection of Divine Revelation, that is, in apostasy. No doubt about it: the writings of Ratzinger the "Theologian" are there for all to see, demonstrating an undeniable proof of this flagrant apostasy.